Week 5 — Lesson 1: Baselines first

2 min

Week 5 opens the modelling part of the course. At NorthPeak the first question is not which model to use, but what a score is worth. "MAE of 3.2 kW" on power sounds fine, until you learn that predicting the mean already gives 13.52 kW, or that "always no fault" is already 93.6 % accurate. This lesson introduces the baseline: the prediction that needs no learning, scored first, so that every later score has a floor to beat.

The prediction that needs no learning

A baseline is a prediction that needs no learning. For a number, predict the mean of the train set, every time. For a yes/no, predict the most common answer, every time. It costs nothing. It is often surprisingly hard to beat.

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This lesson is part of the “Week 5 — Regression, classification and evaluation” module

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